Daily Archives: 6 October, 2016

1893: Paulino Pallas, Spanish anarchist

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Spanish anarchist Paulino Pallas was shot on this date in 1893 for attempting to assassinate the military chief of Catalonia.

A bricklayer’s son who had known starvation days, the politically radicalized Pallas returned from years abroad to his native Catalonia to discover a restive district nearing the brink of outright rebellion.

An 1892 uprising among the Jerez peasantry, a disturbance that ended with four anarchists publicly garroted, stirred Spanish anarchists to a wave of violent revenge. Pallas’s strike came on the September 24, 1893, when he hurled two bombs at a military parade on the Gran Via in Barcelona in an attempt to assassinate Gen. Arsenio Martinez-Campos.

The bombing killed a nearby policeman, but Gen. Martinez-Campos was only slightly injured.

Pallas was arrested on the spot and his lair yielded for the horror of the pro-Bourbon press “many anarchists proclamations, a photo of the anarchists who were executed in Chicago, and several letters from France containing instructions on making a revolution.” Within days, a court-martial condemned him.

The assassin justified his action in a letter published two days after his execution:

I have maintained throughout my life a titanic struggle for existence. I have felt in my own skin the effects of this society, constituted poorly and governed even worse. I observe that it is a gangrenous body, to which you can not place one finger without touching a festering sore. I thought it was necessary to destroy it and I wanted to offer my contribution that demolishing work in the form of another bomb. General Martinez Campos, as a soldier and a gentleman, I respect. But I wanted to hurt him to undo one of the many pillars on which rests the current state of affairs in Spain. […] I state the record that, in undertaking this act, I have not been compelled by any consideration other than to sacrifice my life for the benefit of my brothers in misfortune.

On this day..